Prodigious Perspectives

Wei Ji Ma was born in Groningen, the Netherlands in December, 1978.  He skipped four grades and started attending the University of Groningen at the age of 14.  At age 22, he completed his PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Groningen, successfully passing his thesis defense in October 2001.

He later moved to the United States to pursue academic opportunities in computational neuroscience.  He currently is a full professor at New York University, where he has been since 2013.

(The following interview was conducted via video chat on September 15, 2023.)

Tell me when your parents first noticed something unusual about you.

I grew up only with my mother.  My dad left us when I was very young.  My mom didn’t have a particularly academic background.  She had one year of university education, but she was very academically focused.  I enjoyed doing math at home, and I also loved reading.  At some point I became extremely bored in primary school, and when I became bored, I became disruptive.  I was a bit of a troublemaker, but that got substantially better when I skipped grades.

Do you know at what age you learned to read?

I think around three, but that’s hearsay.  (Laughs.)

How were you able to skip so many grades?

I think lots of people would be able to do it.  For me, I think it was more extreme.  I was just so incredibly bored that I became disruptive, and my mom started talking to the school saying, “Wei Ji is very bored.  Can we do anything?”  Because of the Jena-plan model – it’s an alternative schooling model that has multiple grade levels in the same classroom – it was a little bit easier to access material from higher grades.  For example, we had math worksheets that you can do at your own pace.  At some point I had done all the math worksheets from the higher grades, and there was just very little point staying in a lower grade.

I think the school system helped a little bit.  At the same time, there was also quite a bit of pushback, because this was the Netherlands in the 1980s.  The Netherlands is an extremely egalitarian society, in the sense that everybody has to be the same.  If you stand out in any way, it’s considered slightly abnormal.  That means the teachers were actually pushing back against me skipping grades or accelerating.  But my mom was quite supportive and made sure that I got challenged.  There was a time where I got some material from high school while I was still in elementary school, but the teacher wasn’t well-equipped to help me with that material, so that also didn’t quite work out.

When I was seven years old, conversations started to get me into high school.  In the Netherlands, there’s six years of elementary school until age twelve, and then six years of high school to age eighteen, and it’s highly differentiated.  There are different tiers of high school, and the top two tiers give access to college afterwards.  So when I was seven, my mom and I would tour the high schools of the highest tier in my town, Groningen.

I liked it.  It was good to be at the same intellectual level as my peers.  At the same time, I was four years younger.  So if you’re 8 years old among 12 year olds, or maybe even worse, 12 years old among 16 year olds, then you don’t have true friends.  Everybody’s going to treat you like a younger sibling.  You never make true friends among your peers.  Emotionally it fucks you up a little bit.  I had to catch up on social skills later.

You started university at 14.  After you finished high school, did you face any problems getting into university?

No.  There was no issue.  The only funny thing was that, in the Netherlands, if you want to get a stipend from the government for university studies – everybody is entitled to it – at the time, you had to be 18 years old.  As a 14 year old, I didn’t qualify, and my mom had to apply to a private fund that ended up supporting my expenses.  These are not crazy expenses – this is the Netherlands – but we were also poor and needed a little bit of extra help.

You have two younger brothers.  Did any of them skip grades?

One skipped one grade.  The other one skipped two grades but then had to redo two grades, so that was a more complicated case.

How did you adjust to university life?

There was very little of a transition, because at that point I had been four years younger than the people around me for so many years that I was used to it.  Intellectually, well, I was up to it.  Socially, I actually made some friends at that time.  There were fellow students who really liked board games, so we ended up playing a lot of chess, checkers, Risk, and those kinds of things.  I actually had a slightly better time socially than in high school.

If I would consider whether my kid would skip that many grades, I would be very careful, because it’s an extremely big change socially.  It’s a lasting change.  It’s not always for the better.

You studied both physics and math in university.  How did you choose those subjects?

Actually, those were not my best subjects in high school.  My best subjects were Latin and Greek, believe it or not, the classical languages.  I like Latin much better than Greek, because it’s much more logical, and Greek has these filler words that are very difficult to translate and didn’t sit well with me.

Then I participated in the school Olympiad for physics.  This is not to be confused with the individual Olympiad, the really prestigious competition.  The school Olympiad is much less known.  The five best scores of the students in one school get added together, and the highest scoring schools would compete with each other in more of a debate setting, where you would have time to prepare the answer to a very complex physics problem, then you have to present it, and there’s an opponent and a judging team.  Then we would go on to the international version of the contest, and that really motivated me.  The international version was in Russia, so we got to travel to Russia.  I was 14 years old, or maybe 13.

It was quite an amazing experience.  We met other students who were interested in physics from other high schools, from Eastern Europe mostly.  It was an eye-opening experience.  That’s more or less when I decided I wanted to do physics.

For the longest time, I also really wanted to do biology, mostly because I was interested in ecology and evolution.  I didn’t realize that modern day biology is mostly genes and molecular biology.  Some of my current work is somewhat related to biology, so in a way I’ve come full circle.

Although your PhD was in physics, later you successfully transitioned to neuroscience.

Moving away from physics was actually something that many of my fellow students did.  I did my PhD in physics, and that was a very mixed experience.  Theoretical physics is a bit of a strange animal, because it sometimes feels more like you’re doing abstract math than actual physics.  In my field, which was string theory and high energy physics, it is very difficult to make experimental predictions.  So there is never this feedback loop between experiments and theory, and that felt wrong after a while.  I felt I was doing abstract math all the time, and I wasn’t particularly good at that.

At the same time, I had become very interested in the human brain. So when I got my PhD, I knew for sure that I didn’t want to continue in physics. I even considered careers in politics and in consulting, but in the end, I decided that I wanted to give science another chance and study the thing I was most interested at the time, which was consciousness. I went from one intractable problem to another. (Smiles.)

Computational neuroscience was a relatively new field at the time, and it drew heavily on physicists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists for the quantitative component, so it was relatively easily to go into the field.  There was some grant funding and summer schools for people like myself.  I had to unlearn a lot of things.  I had to respect experimental data, which I didn’t have at all as a theoretical physicist.  But the transition from physics to neuroscience by itself was not unusual.

What are some interesting problems you are working on?

One of the research directions I really like is how people think ahead.  This stems from my own interest in chess and board games.  From a cognitive science point of view, it’s also quite fascinating how people can mentally simulate the future.  Sometimes it’s called mental time travel, because you put yourself into a future state, and you are considering a sequence of states and actions that can go quite deep.  Of course, there’s a lot of computer science about that, but the human side of this is much less understood, like how people reason when they think ahead, for example, in a game or any other planning problem.  We recently had a paper in which we tried to infer what’s happening in people’s minds as they’re planning their next move.  I hope to take that research in other directions.

What keeps you motivated?

I like the day-to-day work a lot.  I like meeting with students.  I like doing simple math.  I like developing new behavioral tasks for people to do.  I like comparing models to data.  It’s very satisfying if a computational model fits the data well.  I think the daily pleasures of the job are a very big part of what keeps me going.

I also have bigger ambitions which have to do with science for the public good.  I think that, as scientists, we are often encouraged to stay within the ivory tower and just write papers for a very small audience, get very specialized grants, and not necessarily do anything that’s useful for the public or for society at large.  I’m trying to push back against that.  I think it’s good if scientists do outreach and science-based advocacy.  I do a little bit of that myself, and it’s a direction I feel very strongly about.

Do you feel that doing a PhD early has helped you?

The immediate benefit was that people invited me to be on TV programs.  (Laughs.)  It was sort of an interesting experience.  It was not that beneficial, but I guess I enjoyed the attention.

I think that my academic trajectory did not benefit much from it, because I switched fields after that.  So the fact that I had a PhD at a younger age was compensated by the fact that I had to learn a new field.  My first postdoc and probably my second postdoc were as if I was doing another PhD.  In a way, I lost those years again.

I think it makes for an interesting life.  It’s sort of a unique experience.  Whether it’s good for kids’ development or young people’s development, I’m not so sure.  I still feel sort of mixed about that.  There are definitely times I felt I had missed out on a normal social life.  Like, the typical experience of going out with friends or dating that people have in their early twenties or even earlier, I didn’t have.  I don’t know if that’s only me being much younger, but also maybe a function of my academic career.  It’s hard to separate that.

How does your life today compare to what you imagined when you were young?

I like that question, especially because it’s hard for me to reconstruct what I had imagined. I know for sure that I wanted to be a professor, but I had no idea what that entailed. So in that case, things turned out the way I imagined it.

I definitely had envisioned that I would stay in physics, because I shared the mentality that physics is the most supreme of all the sciences, and all the other sciences are sort of followers.  They are inferior, they are more applied sciences.  (Smiles.)  It took me a while to get over that prejudice and to start appreciating experimental psychology and computational neuroscience.  If you told my 14 year old self that I would be doing behavioral experiments on humans, then I’d say that would be incredibly hard to believe.

If you hadn’t become a professor, what might have you become?

A chess grandmaster?  I think I was, for a short while, on track to go that route.  My mom essentially stopped it, and that was for good reason, because it’s a very insecure job, and there are so many of them, and you have to constantly stay good.  If you lose your abilities, you lose your livelihood.  And it can also become an obsession.  But it was definitely on my radar when I was younger.

When I was a little bit older, I would say high school teacher.  Sort of an unsurprising choice, but I still like motivating young people for the sciences in particular, and for critical thinking and for data literacy too.  Then some kind of political organizer or community organizer, like somebody working for a big environmental nonprofit.  I could imagine myself doing that.

What three words would your friends and colleagues use to describe you?

This is always hard to know, because people probably talk about you without you knowing.  But I think objectively, I was an arrogant little brat for most of my childhood, so I think they would have used “arrogant little brat” behind my back.  (Smiles.)

And now I’m sort of known as being hyper-active, with a hyphen, doing too many things at the same time, like being involved in all kinds of initiatives.  I’m very much an organizer, so I organize a lot of things around causes that I find important and perspectives that I find important.  That’s a bit unusual in academia, so I think I stand out that way.  I also like to be known as someone who’s accessible and a good mentor, because unfortunately, that is not universal in academia.  Some [principal investigators], when they become really famous and powerful, stop caring about their mentees.  I hope that never happens to me.

What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?

I don’t know.  I don’t remember advice, or deliberately don’t follow advice.  I think advice is overrated, honestly, because often it comes with this pretense of generality.  In reality, people can take many different routes and be successful in many different ways.  Some advice is good, like about learning the process and practicalities of going through a career.  But in terms of life advice, I think almost all of it is overrated.

I guess if there’s anything I try to live by, it’s not take myself too seriously.  That’s sort of a constant struggle, because as someone who’s much younger than their peers, you’re sort of forced into taking yourself very seriously, because you are considered a genius and prodigy, and then you derive a large part of your identity from that, and then you have to unlearn that.

What do you do in your spare time?

I have kids, so that takes a lot of my spare time.  This Sunday I’m going to The March to End Fossil Fuels here in New York.

What personal goals do you still have?

I already mentioned one, which is to have science become more outward facing and work more towards the public good than towards publishing papers.

I do have specialized thoughts about the reform of academia.  I don’t think I should bore you with those now, but they have to do with improving mentorship, improving outreach, and breaking down hierarchies.  Those are some things that are important to me, but they are niche.  But I definitely dislike the hierarchical structure of academia in many ways, like professors are all-powerful and can completely decide the fate of PhD students, for example.  That doesn’t sit well with me.  The fact that professors don’t take training in mentorship doesn’t sit well with me.

I would like to change my research to something that’s more relevant to the climate crisis, but I don’t know how yet.

What do you see yourself doing in twenty years?

I think I’ll still be very idealistic.  That has sort of been the story of my life.  Compared to my peers in academia, I tend to be more outspoken about social justice and environmental justice.  I think that’s not something that I’m going to change.  Hopefully I’ll be able to actually do more in those areas.  I don’t know if I see myself necessarily being successful in that, but I’d like to try.  I mean, if the planet dies, then there’s no more science, so it’s in everybody’s interest that we all work to stop climate change.